Céleste Richard-Zimmermann: A Palais de Tokyo Solo Without a Gallery of Record
Updated: Sep 20
Céleste Richard-Zimmermann carves polystyrene and polyurethane foam into monumental bas-reliefs in Nantes. The Palais de Tokyo awarded her its fifteenth prize in December 2025, with a solo exhibition running there from October 2026. As of September 2026, no auction result for her work is publicly recorded and no gallery of record exists.
The Association des Amis du Palais de Tokyo awarded its fifteenth prize to Céleste Richard-Zimmermann (b. 1993, Mulhouse) in December 2025, and with it a solo exhibition Toutes les colonnes n’ont pas un cœur de pierre runs at the Palais de Tokyo from 21 October 2026 to 14 February 2027, curated by Horya Makhlouf. A 2017 Beaux-Arts de Nantes graduate still based in the city, she carves polystyrene and polyurethane foam into monumental bas-reliefs and paints in oil and acid on steel. The record is deep, French, and almost entirely public. Three public collections hold her work: the Frac Poitou-Charentes, the Fonds d’art contemporain – Paris Collections, which holds Bleuet, and the Nantes artothèque. Challans commissioned a permanent column-bench, Les Semeurs, for its Théâtre le Marais forecourt. Earlier solos ran at Le Carré, Château-Gontier, and Zoo, Nantes.
The Record Names Funders, Not Prices
No auction result for her work is publicly recorded, and no primary price has been published. What the documentation supplies instead is production credit: Martyre décorum was supported by the Région des Pays de la Loire; Tout coule (Panta Rhei) by Le Carré, the Zoo art centre and the airline Volotea; Grand’Ensemble by a cultural cooperative in Mons-en-Barœul. Each major work is traceable to who paid to make it rather than to what it sold for, which leaves a collector without an independent benchmark to triangulate against. No gallery of record sets the price, and no auction has tested one.
The Works That Built the Career Are Not the Works That Move
Scale is the complication. Grand’Ensemble measures 6.1 by 4.2 metres; Martyre décorum runs six metres wide; Tout coule (Panta Rhei) covers roughly 25 square metres of polyurethane foam. Residencies at Budapest Galéria and in Recife worked the same way in 2023: partner institutions funded and showed the result. What reaches collections is the portable end of the practice — oil on steel at 70 by 55 centimetres, and at the Nantes artothèque work bought through a 2020 municipal support fund that took in 130 works by 96 artists at once. Public collections are accessioning her; the market that would price those holdings has not formed.
Who Places the Work After the Palais de Tokyo?
The prize describes her position: The Art Newspaper France reported that it is reserved for artists with under ten years of practice and no major gallery. Her one Paris gallery appearance this autumn, Mes Dalton at Loevenbruck in September, is a twenty-seven-artist group show assembled by a former art centre director from three decades of his own programming — an invitation, not a roster placement. A four-month solo at the Palais de Tokyo will generate attention with no commercial channel to absorb it. Whether that channel appears, and on whose terms, is what the record cannot answer. Even where a gallery relationship does exist, it is not a guarantee: what happens to an artist's market when the gallery itself stops trading is a separate risk worth understanding before assuming representation solves the pricing gap.
The gallery has an interest in the sale. The auction house has an interest in the estimate. This report has neither.
A full Artist Career Trajectory Report on Céleste Richard-Zimmermann is available now — institutional standing, market position, and risk assessment, based on independent due diligence.
